More miscellany Parts One & Two (Evolution)

by David Turell , Sunday, August 18, 2024, 18:34 (95 days ago) @ dhw

“De novo” (The Cambrian)

DAVID: Yikes!!! Show me one early eye form in the Ediacaran? Well!

Organs/organisms continued to evolve DURING the Cambrian. Anyway. Have a look at this:

The below is a total diversion. SHOW ME HOW THE EYES IN THE CAMBRAIN EVOLVED. YOU CAN'T

Evolution of the eye | New Scientist

New Scientist
https://www.newscientist.com › definition › evolution-o...

"The key to the puzzle, Darwin said, was to find eyes of intermediate complexity in the animal kingdom that would demonstrate a possible path from simple to sophisticated.
Those intermediate forms have now been found. According to evolutionary biologists, it would have taken less than half a million years for the most rudimentary eye to evolve into a complex “camera” eye like ours.
The first step is to evolve light-sensitive cells. This appears to be a trivial matter. Many single-celled organisms have eyespots made of light-sensitive pigments. Some can even swim towards or away from light. Such rudimentary light-sensing abilities confer an obvious survival advantage.
The next step was for multicellular organisms to concentrate their light-sensitive cells into a single location. Patches of photosensitive cells were probably common long before the Cambrian, allowing early animals to detect light and sense what direction it was coming from. Such rudimentary visual organs are still used by jellyfish and flatworms and other primitive groups, and are clearly better than nothing."

99.9% versus 0.1%

DAVID: The Raup numbers are overall statistics for all of evolution lumped together. Stop over-interpreting them.

dhw: It is you who overinterpreted them by insisting that your God HAD to design and cull the irrelevant 99.9% in order to “produce” the 0.1%. You have agreed that the 99.9% did NOT produce the current 0.1%, because species that had no descendants can’t have produced descendants!!! For example, only 4 out of 700 dinosaurs produced ancestors of current species. The 696 were therefore irrelevant to your version of your God’s purpose. Hence your ridicule of his method as “imperfect” and “inefficient”, though you refuse to accept that your theory might be wrong.

Your screwy interpretation trudges on. The 99.9% extinct produced the 0.1% surviving.

Plant controls (now “cellular intelligence”)

dhw: Whether that intelligence is powerful enough IN SOME SPECIES to allow for further speciation is a moot point, but that is why I say you are on the verge of accepting Shapiro’s theory. Acknowledgement of intelligence is a very big step in that direction. So too is acknowledgement that there are different degrees of intelligence. Some cell communities cannot go beyond devising means of survival. Comparatively few will be able to innovate. We can see an analogy in humans: not many of us have creative, innovative intelligence. But it only takes a few to create whole new industries/species.

DAVID: It is only your view, not mine.

dhw: You have already agreed that all forms of life show some sort of intelligence. Please tell us exactly what you disagree with.

The analogy of human variation does not make sense. All cells are limited to very minor adaptions.

The universe

QUOTE: "Today, there are between 6-20 trillion galaxies in the Universe.
bbb"Most stars exist within Milky Way-like galaxies, but most galaxies aren’t like ours. (DAVID’s bold)

DAVID: the universe is massive, but our galaxy stands out. That difference led to the ability for our Earth to form. Viewed from a standpoint of design, it shows purposeful planning to reach some specialized galaxies that could contain the Earth. dhw wonders why God made the universe so big. I don't know, but as part of God's planning I just accept it as required.

dhw: There are still billions of them. This is one of the factors that make it so hard to believe in a single, sourceless mind, let alone one that “creates” such unimaginable numbers of heavenly bodies in order to produce one species and its food. It requires as much blind faith as that of the atheist who believes that the still unfathomable complexities of life can be engineered by sheer chance.

You are left with the sourceless mind!!!